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Order Info Subject: English, Literature and Philology Topic: Critical Reading Response Type of work: Essay Level: Undergraduate Number of pages: 3 pages =300/- Grade: High Quality (Normal Charge) Formatting style: APA Language Style: English (U.S.) Website Region: United States Customer Time: The responses should be 800-1100 words in length (double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12-point font). Craft an analytical reading response that draws on your experience to lay out the problems/ ideas/thesis addressed in that week and substantiate why that idea/ thesis excites you or troubles you. You use the attached readings for the response. You can just choose one as well. -- Quality is Not an Option 3 Critical Reading Response Student’s Name Institutional Affiliation Instructor Course Date Timothy Mitchell in the Order of Development of the Rule of Experts questions the way Egypt is viewed internationally. One learns that the country is judged harshly despite having excellent raw materials and amazing geographical features. For example, assessing the country’s level of economic development involves unrelated factors such as questioning the geographic and demographic conditions associated with the country. Another problem that the author highlights is the unfair negative perception of the country when compared to others (Mitchell, 2002). For example, a simple matter concerning agricultural development in Egypt must always involve an angry assessment of the social and economic implications of its agricultural practices. Therefore, the objects of assessing the natural entities in Egypt are based on the rhetoric that needs to be reiterated. This implies that when international authors and researchers are trying to showcase Egypt, they will turn positive aspects about the country negatively for Egypt to appear unfavorable. An illustration of contrasting depictions of the country is when Egypt decided to implement infitah. Mitchell (2002) submits that this is was Egypt’s international approach to reducing its grip on foreign direct investment in the country. Before adopting the open door policy in the year 1973, its government had tightly controlled most of the economic entities. For example, the government controlled trade, the major industries in the region, construction sector and even the financial aspects of the region. Simplifying the reforms that the government marely allowed the private sector to control the nation’s economy is therefore flawed. The term overpopulation when speaking about Egypt is also questioned. Mitchell (2002) argues that overpopulation should be thoroughly exemplified, as it can sometimes be used to poorly judge a country. The author submits References Mitchell, T. (2002). The Object of Development. In Rule of experts : Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. University Of California Press. ‌ 7 The Object of Development Open almost any study of Egypt produced by an American or international development agency and you are likely to find it starting with the same simple image. The question of Egypt’s economic development is almost invariably introduced as a problem of geography versus demography, pictured by describing the narrow valley of the Nile River, surrounded by desert, crowded with rapidly multiplying millions of inhabitants. A 1980 World Bank report on Egypt provides a typical example. “The geographical and demographic characteristics of Egypt delineate its basic economic problem,” the report begins. Although the country contains about 386,000 square miles, . . . only a narrow strip in the Nile Valley and its Delta is usable. This area of 15,000 square miles—less than 4 percent of the land—is but an elongated oasis in the midst of desert. Without the Nile, which flows through Egypt for about a thousand miles without being joined by a single tributary, the country would be part of the Sahara. Crammed into the habitable area is 98 percent of the population. . . . The population has been growing rapidly and is estimated to have doubled since 1947.1 The visual simplicity of the image, spread out like a map before the reader’s eye, combines with the arithmetical certainty of population figures, surface areas, and growth rates to lay down the logic of the analysis to follow: “One of the world’s oldest agricultural economies,” a report written for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) begins, Egypt depends upon the fruits of the narrow ribbon of cultivated land adjacent to the Nile and to that river’s rich fan- shaped delta. For more than 5,000 years agriculture has sustained Egypt. During the first half of this century, however, . . . the growth of agriculture failed to keep up with the needs of a population which doubled, then nearly tripled. It is a matter of simple arithmetic . . .2 The popularity of this image of space and numbers is summed up in the World Bank report. “These two themes—the relatively fixed amount of usable land and the rapid growth of the population—will be seen as leitmotifs in the discussion of Egypt’s economic problems.”3 Fields of analysis often develop a convention for introducing their object. Such tropes come to seem too obvious and straightforward to question. The somewhat poetic imagery favored by writings on Egyptian development seldom lasts beyond the opening paragraph, and the text moves quickly on to the serious business of social or economic argument. Yet the visual imagery of an opening paragraph can establish the entire relationship between the textual analysis and its object. Such relationships are never simple. Objects of analysis do not occur as natural phenomena, but are partly formed by the discourse that describes them. The more Mitchell, T. (2002). Rule of experts : Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:48:37. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 0 2 . U n iv e rs ity o f C a lif o rn ia P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . natural the object appears, the less obvious this discursive manufacture will be. The description that invariably begins the study of Egypt’s economic development forms its object in two respects. In the first place, the topographic image of the river, the desert surrounding it, and the population jammed within its banks defines the object to be analyzed in terms of the tangible limits of nature, physical space, and human reproduction. These apparently natural boundaries shape the kinds of solutions that will follow: a more scientific management of resources, and new technologies to overcome their natural limits. The world is divided into nature and science, the material and the technological, a realm of objects and a realm of ideas. Yet the apparent naturalness of the imagery is misleading. The assumptions and figures on which it is based can be examined and reinterpreted to reveal a very different picture. The limits of this alternative picture are not those of geography and nature but of powerlessness and social inequality. What appears as nature is already shaped by forms of power, technology, expertise, and privilege. The alternative solutions that follow are not just technological and managerial, but social and political. In the second place, the naturalness of the topographic image, so easily pictured, sets up the object of development as just that—an object, out there, not a part of the study but external to it. The discourse of international development constitutes itself in this way as an expertise and intelligence that stands completely apart from the country and the people it describes. Much of this intelligence is generated by organizations such as the World Bank and USAID, which came to play a powerful economic and political role within countries like Egypt. International development has a special need to overlook this internal involvement in the places and problems it analyzes, and present itself instead as an external intelligence that stands outside the objects it describes. The geographical realism with which Egypt is so often introduced helps establish this deceptively simple relationship. Earlier chapters of this book have discussed a series of projects and forces that configured the Egyptian countryside in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the estate system and the law of property, irrigation works and epidemic disease, artificial fertilizer and industrial crops, the manufacture of heritage, and the importation of social science. The final part of the book turns to the end of the twentieth century. In 1973–74 the government of Egypt announced an “open door” economic policy (infitah), after almost two decades of close regulation of foreign investment and imports. The government’s ownership, funding, and management of large industry, trade, construction, and finance was now to be complemented by foreign and local private sector initiatives, often in partnership with state banks and enterprises. The significance of this change in policy should not be exaggerated. Economic relations had been formatted as a mix of government and so- called private processes since at least the creation of modern landed property, law, irrigation works, railways, policing, hygiene, and other networks in the nineteenth century, as we saw in chapter 2, and this formatting had gone through numerous crises and adjustments. The reforms of the last quarter of the twentieth century represented another series of adjustments, rather than any simple shift from “the state” to “the private sector” or, as it came to be known, “the market.” One important part of this reformatting was the new role played in Egypt by the three Washington-based political agencies increasingly active across the postcolonial world, the Mitchell, T. (2002). Rule of experts : Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:48:37. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 0 2 . U n iv e rs ity o f C a lif o rn ia P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and USAID. These public sector agencies formed alliances with U.S. and other Western banks, corporations, government treasuries, and foreign ministries, and with a variety of forces within Egypt, both official and unofficial. They also met with resistance in Egypt, official and unofficial, and were seldom able simply to impose new policies, still less to control the outcome when their interventions were successful. Where they did achieve results, however, was in their monopoly of expertise. The final three chapters examine this expertise and its place in Egyptian politics. The current chapter examines the reforms of the 1970s and 1980s, and the way these were formatted as solutions to the problems of geography and nature in terms of which Egypt was always defined. Chapters 8 and 9 look at the crisis that followed at the end of the 1980s, and the remaking of the economy in the economic reforms of the 1990s. TOO MANY PEOPLE? We can start with the common image of overpopulation and land shortage. Whenever you hear the word “overpopulation,” Susan George suggests, “you should reach, if not for your revolver, at least for your calculator.”4 It is seldom clear, as she points out, to what the prefix “over” refers. What is the norm or the comparison to which it relates? “Egypt has the largest population . . . in the Middle East,” noted the World Bank report Trends in Developing Economies in 1989: “Its 52 million people are crowded into the Nile delta and valley . . . with a density higher than that of Bangladesh or Indonesia.”5 Why Bangladesh and Indonesia? The World Bank might equally have mentioned Belgium, say, or South Korea, where population densities were respectively three and four times higher than Indonesia—but where the comparison would have had a less negative implication. It is true that Egypt’s level of agricultural population per hectare of arable land was similar to that of Bangladesh, and about double that of Indonesia.6 But this comparison is misleading, for arable land in Egypt is vastly more productive. It was estimated in 1986 that Egyptian agricultural output per hectare was more than three times that of both Bangladesh and Indonesia.7 So it is not clear that Egypt was overpopulated in relation to either of these countries. Perhaps it would be more realistic to gauge Egypt’s land shortage by comparing it not with poorer countries but with places that had a similar total population and per capita gross national product, combined with far greater areas of cultivated land. The Philippines and Thailand were the two closest examples in population size and GNP and had cultivated areas three times and eight times that of Egypt, respectively.8 Yet despite having far less land to farm, Egypt’s agricultural population produced more crops per person than either of these countries. Egyptian agricultural output per worker was perhaps 8 percent higher than that of the Philippines and 73 percent higher than that of Thailand.9 Despite the visual power of the image of more than 50 million Egyptians crowded into the valley of the Nile, there is no prima facie evidence for the assumption that this population was too large for its cultivable area. Perhaps it might be argued in more general terms that the world’s population is too large in relation to the earth’s limited resources.10 In that case, Mitchell, T. (2002). Rule of experts : Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:48:37. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 0 2 . U n iv e rs ity o f C a lif o rn ia P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . however, there is no reason to single out Egyptians. On the contrary, Egyptians made very modest demands on the world’s resources (measured in terms of energy consumption per capita) compared with inhabitants of Western Europe, Japan, and North America. One inhabitant of the United Kingdom, for example, required more of the world’s energy per year than six Egyptians, and one American was more expensive in energy terms than a dozen Egyptians.11 So it can hardly be the latter who were threatening the world’s limited resources. Perhaps it can be agreed that having more than fifty million inhabitants did not necessarily make Egypt “overpopulated.” Development experts might insist, however, that the problem was not the size of Egypt’s population but the rate at which it was growing. A report in 1976 by the United States Department of Agriculture asserted that the country’s “exploding population is the most serious problem facing Egypt today.”12 The rapid growth in population appeared to have outstripped the country’s ability to feed itself, and in 1974 Egypt became a net importer of agricultural commodities. By the 1980s food accounted for almost 30 percent of Egypt’s merchandise imports, a higher proportion than for all except one of the one hundred countries for which figures were available.13 It would appear from these figures that the case for an imbalance between population figures and agricultural resources had been established after all. But before accepting this conclusion we should reach, once again, for the calculator. NOT ENOUGH FOOD? Between 1965 and 1980, according to World Bank tables, the population of Egypt grew at an annual rate of 2.1 percent. Yet during the same period, the World Bank also shows, agricultural production grew at the even faster rate of 2.7 percent a year. During the 1980s, when the population growth rate increased to 2.4 percent a year, agricultural growth continued to keep ahead.14 In 1991, food production per capita was 17 percent higher than at the start of the previous decade.15 So it is not true that the population was growing faster than the country’s ability to feed itself. If this is the case, then why did the country have to import ever increasing amounts of food? The answer is to be found by looking at the kinds of food being eaten, and at who got to eat it. Official statistics suggest that Egyptians were consuming relatively large amounts of food. The World Bank ranked Egypt as a “low income” country in the 1980s, yet the country’s daily calorie supply per capita was estimated to be higher than all except one of the “lower middle- income” countries, and indeed higher than a majority of the world’s upper-middle and high- income countries.16 The daily protein supply per capita also exceeded the level of most middle-income countries and rivaled that of many high-income countries.17 Despite these figures, Egyptians suffered from high rates of undernutrition. A 1988 survey found that 29 percent of children suffered from mild undernutrition and another 31 percent from moderate or severe undernutrition.18 Between 1978 and 1986 the prevalence of acute undernutrition may have more than doubled.19 A study of anemia (probably caused by the interaction of malnutrition and infection) in Cairo found the condition in 80 percent of children under two years old and in 90 percent of pregnant women,20 rates that the World Bank described as “alarmingly high.”21 Clearly the high figures for calorie and protein supply per capita did not Mitchell, T. (2002). Rule of experts : Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:48:37. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 0 2 . U n iv e rs ity o f C a lif o rn ia P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . reflect the actual distribution or consumption of food. What the calorie figures probably reflected was high levels of food consumption among the better off, a shift in what they consumed toward more expensive foods, especially meat, and the diversion of food supplies from humans to animals. A World Bank study of agricultural pricing policy in Egypt in the 1980s noted that there was a very high variation in the value of food consumed between rich and poor, which it attributed to the low per capita level of income and its unequal distribution.22 This inequality was already increasing from 1964/65 to 1974/75: in the countryside the share of household expenditure of the lowest 20 percent of households decreased from 7 to less than 6 percent in that decade, while in urban areas the share of the top 20 percent of households increased from 47 to 51 percent.23 During the brief oil boom from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, the income of the poor improved and the gap between low- and middle-income families may have narrowed. But the wealthiest 5 percent increased their income share between 1974/75 and 1981/82 from 22 percent to 25 percent in the case of rural households and to 29 percent in the case of urban.24 In the late 1980s, as USAID and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) finally succeeded in imposing restructuring policies that removed price subsidies, increased unemployment, and brought economic recession, the degree of inequality almost certainly increased. A 1992 report on Egypt for USAID made clear that under these policies “losers necessarily outnumber winners.” While arguing that the increased poverty for the majority would occur only in the short term, the report admitted that there was no indication of any significant progress toward the long-term benefits this poverty was believed to bring.25 Increasing wealth, together with increasing numbers of resident foreigners and tourists, led to a large increase in the demand for meat and other animal products, which were “chiefly consumed by tourists and other non-Egyptians, plus middle- and upper-class urban residents.”26 A 1981/82 household survey showed that the richest 25 percent consumed more than three times as much chicken and beef as the poorest 25 percent.27 In the subsequent oil- boom years, income growth together with extensive U.S. and Egyptian government subsidies encouraged a broader switch from diets based on legumes and maize (corn) to less healthy diets of wheat and meat products. From 1970 to 1980, while crop production grew in real value by 17 percent, livestock production grew almost twice as much, by 32 percent.28 In the following seven years crop production grew by 10 percent, but livestock production by almost 50 percent.29 To produce one kilogram of red meat requires ten kilograms of cereals, so feeding these animals required a large and costly diversion of staple food supplies from human to animal consumption.30 FODDER FOR PEACE It was this switch to meat consumption, rather than the increase in population, that required the dramatic increase in imports of food, particularly grains. Between 1966 and 1988 the population of Egypt grew by 75 percent. In the same period, the domestic production of grains increased by 77 percent but total grain consumption increased by 148 percent, or almost twice the rate of population increase.31 Egypt began to import large and ever increasing quantities of Mitchell, T. (2002). Rule of experts : Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:48:37. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 0 2 . U n iv e rs ity o f C a lif o rn ia P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . grain, becoming the world’s third biggest importer after Japan and China. A small proportion of the increase in imports reflected an increase in per capita human consumption, which grew by 12 percent in this twenty-two-year period. But the bulk of the new imports was required to cover the increasing use of grains to feed animals. Grain imports grew by 5.9 million metric tons between 1966 and 1988, to cover an estimated increase in nonfood consumption of grains (mostly animal feed, but also seed use and wastage) of 5.3 million tons, or 268 percent (see fig. 2).32 The dependence on grain imports after 1974 was caused not by population growth, which lagged behind the growth of domestic grain production, but by a shift to the consumption of meat. This shift was obscured, however, by the way different grains were used. Rather than importing animal feed directly, Egypt diverted domestic production from human to animal consumption. Human consumption of maize (corn) and other coarse grains (barley, sorghum) dropped from 53 percent in 1966 to 6 percent in 1988.33 Human supplies were made up with imports, largely of wheat for bread making. So it appeared as though the imports were required not to feed animals supplying the increased demand for meat, but because the people needed more bread. USAID supported the shift to meat consumption among the better off by financing at reduced interest rates more than three billion dollars worth of Egyptian grain purchases from the United States between 1975 and 1988, making Egypt the world’s largest importer of subsidized grains. Yet the agency claimed that the purpose of these subsidies was “to help the poor.”34 Figure 2. Supply and consumption of grains in Egypt, 1966–90. Source: Calculated from USAID, Status Report (Cairo, 1989). Subsidized American loans financed only a part of the grain imports. The rest required further borrowing, contributing to a total external debt that in 1989 reached $51.5 billion, a figure surpassed that year by only five other countries. Whereas the debt levels of the other five heavily indebted countries ranged between 22 and 95 percent of gross national product, Mitchell, T. (2002). Rule of experts : Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:48:37. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 0 2 . U n iv e rs ity o f C a lif o rn ia P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . Egypt’s debt amounted to 165 percent of its GNP.35 Egypt began to default on the debt and required large loans just to keep up payments on its earlier loans. To address this crisis, the United States used the pretext of Egyptian support in 1990–91 for a war against Iraq to write off Egypt’s $7 billion military debt and to arrange for a relaxation of the remaining $28 billion of long-term bilateral debt, half of which was written off and half rescheduled.36 As a condition of this refinancing, the United States insisted on a further shift toward export crops, away from staple foods, to produce more hard currency to pay the debts. The transformation in food consumption habits affected not only agricultural imports and the balance of payments, but also domestic agriculture. By the 1980s it was no longer accurate to write that Egyptian capitalist agriculture “still is to a large extent the cultivation of cotton.”37 In terms of the commitment of land and labor, the priority was now the production of meat, poultry, and dairy products. In 1989 cotton occupied only about one million of Egypt’s six million acres.38 The other major industrial crop, sugarcane, occupied a little over a quarter of a million acres. Of the remaining four and three-quarter million acres, more than half was used to grow animal fodder—principally Egyptian clover (berseem) in the winter and maize and sorghum in the summer and autumn.39 Egypt was now growing more food for animals to consume than for humans. The shift to the production of meat and other animal products (which was accompanied by an increased production of other more expensive, nonstaple agricultural products, particularly fruit and vegetables) had two principal causes. First, as the World Bank put it, “effective demand has been modified by a change in income distribution.”40 In other words, the growing disparity in income between rich and poor enabled the better off to divert the country’s resources from the production of staples to the production of luxury items. Second, the Egyptian government, supported by the large American loans already mentioned (called “Food For Peace”), encouraged this diversion by subsidizing the import of staples for consumers, heavily taxing the production of staples by farmers, and subsidizing the production of meat, poultry, and dairy products.41 Livestock raising was particularly concentrated on large farms, those over ten acres, where there were three to four times as many cattle per acre as on farms of one to ten acres.42 Yet government food policy forced even the smallest farmers to shift from self-provisioning to the production of animal products and to rely increasingly on subsidized imported flour for their staple diet. The image of a vast population packed within a limited agricultural area and increasing in size at a rate that outpaced its ability to feed itself is therefore quite misleading. The growth in agricultural production was always ahead of population growth. Egypt’s food problem was the result not of too many people occupying too little land, but of the power of a certain part of that population, supported by the prevailing domestic and international regime, to shift the country’s resources from staple foods to more expensive items of consumption. Population growth rates of over 2.5 percent a year, some might argue, were nevertheless still very high. Surely it would have been better to produce fewer children and more buffaloes, cows, and chickens—as in fact a 1990 family planning initiative proposed. But this depends on one’s point of view. Such a proposal would probably have seemed reasonable to an upper- class or middle-class family in Cairo, and indeed the birth rate among such families was Mitchell, T. (2002). Rule of experts : Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:48:37. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 0 2 . U n iv e rs ity o f C a lif o rn ia P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . already much lower. But to a rural family or among the urban poor it might seem far less reasonable. In a social world where daughters leave their parents’ family at marriage to join their husbands’ households, and where there is virtually no system of social security to support parents when they become too old or sick to work, it can be argued that to desire a minimum of two surviving male children was not excessive. According to figures for 1980, in rural Upper Egypt, the poorest part of the country and the region with the highest fertility rate, women gave birth to an average of 7.5 children during their childbearing years. But almost one in three of their children (2.7 out of the 7.5) died in childhood.43 Under these circumstances, if the parents’ aim was to ensure that at least two sons survived to support them in later life, then 7.5 children was not an unreasonable birth rate. After 1980 infant deaths were reduced, thanks largely to a simple treatment for diarrhea, and women began to have smaller families.44 These women were unlikely to attribute their economic problems to population growth, as did the World Bank. Far more serious, perhaps, was the insecurity of their futures, their meager share of local, national, and global resources, and the political and economic powerlessness that prevented them from altering this condition. Any discussion of their situation would have to start from this question of power. NOT ENOUGH LAND? The effect the pictorial framework has on the analysis it introduces can be seen by turning to the question that is central to the problem of rural poverty and powerlessness, that of land distribution. The image of a narrow strip of fertile land crammed with so many millions of inhabitants enabled most contemporary analyses of Egyptian economic development to move very … 4 The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique No one, wise Kuublai, knows better than you that the city must never be con- fused with the words that describe it. -1talo Calvino, Invisible Cities Time is a fatal handicap to the baroque conception of the world: its mechani- cal order makes no allowances for growth, change, adaptation, and creative renewal. In short, a baroque plan was a block achievement. It must be laid out at a stroke, fixed and frozen forever, as if done overnight by Arabian nights genii. Such a plan demands a n architectural despot, working for an absolute ruler, who will live long enough to complete their own conceptions. To alter this type of plan, to introduce fresh elements of another style, is to break its es- thetic backbone. -Lewis Mumford, The City i n History In Mumford's epigraph to this chapter, his criticism is directed a t Pierre-Charles L'Enfant's Washington in particular and at baroque urban planning in general.' Greatly amplified, Mumford's criticism could be applied to the work and thought of the Swiss-born French es- sayist, painter, architect, and planner Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, who is better known by his professional name, Le Corbusier. Jeanneret was the embodiment of high-modernist urban design. Active roughly between 1920 and 1960, he was less an architect than a visionary plan- ner of planetary ambitions. The great majority of his gargantuan schemes were never built; they typically required a political resolve and financial wherewithal that few political authorities could muster. Some monuments to his expansive genius do exist, the most notable of which are perhaps Chandigarh, the austere capital of India's Punjab, and L'Unitk d'Habitation, a large apartment complex in Marseilles, but his legacy is most apparent in the logic of his unbuilt megaprojects. At one time or another he proposed city-planning schemes for Paris, Algiers, S5o Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Stockholm, Geneva, and B a r ~ e l o n a . ~ His early politics was a bizarre combination of Sorel's revolutionary syndicalism and Saint-Simon's utopian modernism, and he designed both in Soviet Russia (1928-36)3 and in Vichy for Mar- shal Philippe Pktain. The key manifesto of modern urban planning, the Athens charter of the Congrks Internationaux dlArchitecture Mod- erne (CIAM), faithfully reflected his doctrines. Scott, J. C. (1999). Seeing like a state : How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:45:38. C o p yr ig h t © 1 9 9 9 . Y a le U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 104 T R A N S F O R M I N G V I S I O N S Le Corbusier embraced the huge, machine-age, hierarchical, cen- tralized city with a vengeance. If one were looking for a caricature- a Colonel Blimp, as it were, of modernist urbanism-one could hardly do better than to invent Le Corbusier. His views were extreme but in- fluential, and they were representative in the sense that they cele- brated the logic implicit in high modernism. In his daring, his bril- liance, and his consistency, Le Corbusier casts the high-modernist faith in sharp relief.4 Total City Planning In The R a d i a n t City ( L a ville radieuse), published in 1933 and repub- lished with few changes in 1964, Le Corbusier offers the most complete exposition of his views.5 Here as elsewhere, Le Corbusier's plans were self-consciously immodest. If E. F. Schumacher made the case for the virtue of smallness, Le Corbusier asserted, in effect, "Big is beautiful." The best way to appreciate the sheer extravagance of his reach is to look briefly at three of his designs. The first is the core idea behind his Plan Voisin for central Paris (figure 14); the second, a new "business city" for Buenos Aires (figure 15); and the last, a vast housing scheme for about ninety thousand residents in Rio de Janeiro (figure 16). In their magnitude, these plans speak for themselves. No compro- mise is made with the preexisting city; the new cityscape completely supplants its predecessor. In each case, the new city has striking sculp- tural properties; it is designed to make a powerful visual impact as a form. That impact, it is worth noting, can be had only from a great dis- tance. Buenos Aires is pictured as if seen from many miles out to sea: a view of the New World "after a two-week crossing," writes Le Corbu- sier, adopting the perspective of a modern-day Christopher C o l ~ m b u s . ~ Rio is seen at several miles remove, as if from an airplane. What we be- hold is a six-kilometer-long highway elevated one hundred meters and enclosing a continuous ribbon of fifteen-story apartments. The new city literally towers over the old. The plan for a city of 3 million in Paris is seen from far above and outside, the distance emphasized by dots rep- resenting vehicles on the major avenue as well as by a small airplane and what appears to be a helicopter. None of the plans makes any ref- erence to the urban history, traditions, or aesthetic tastes of the place in which it is to be located. The cities depicted, however striking, be- tray no context; in their neutrality, they could be anywhere at all. While astoundingly high construction costs may explain why none of these projects was ever adopted, Le Corbusier's refusal to make any appeal to local pride in a n existing city cannot have helped his case. Scott, J. C. (1999). Seeing like a state : How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:45:38. C o p yr ig h t © 1 9 9 9 . Y a le U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 14. Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin for Paris, a city of 3 million people 15. Le Corbusier's plan for the "business city" of Buenos Aires, as if seen from an approaching ship Scott, J. C. (1999). Seeing like a state : How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:45:38. C o p yr ig h t © 1 9 9 9 . Y a le U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 106 TRANSFORMING V I S I O N S 16. Le Corbusier's plan for roads and housing in Rio de Janeiro Le Corbusier had no patience for the physical environment that centuries of urban living had created. He heaped scorn on the tangle, darkness, and disorder, the crowded and pestilential conditions, of Paris and other European cities at the turn of the century. Part of his scorn was, as we shall see, on functional and scientific grounds; a city that was to become efficient and healthful would indeed have had to demolish much of what it had inherited. But another source of his scorn was aesthetic. He was visually offended by disarray and confu- sion. And the disorder he wished to correct was not so much a disorder at ground level but a disorder that was a function of distance, a bird's- eye view.7 His mixed motives are nicely captured in his judgment on small rural properties as seen from the air (figure 17). "From air- planes, a look down on infinitely subdivided, incongruously shaped plots of land. The more modern machinery develops, the more land is chopped up into tiny holdings that render the miraculous promise of machinery useless. The result is waste: inefficient, individual scrab- bling."8 The purely formal order was at least as important as the accom- modation with the machine age. "Architecture," he insisted, "is the art above all others which achieves a state of platonic grandeur, mathe- matical order, speculation, the perception of harmony that lies in emotional relation~hips."~ Formal, geometric simplicity and functional efficiency were not two distinct goals to be balanced; on the contrary, formal order was a pre- condition of efficiency. Le Corbusier set himself the task of inventing the ideal industrial city, in which the "general truths" behind the ma- chine age would be expressed with graphic simplicity. The rigor and unity of this ideal city required that it make as few concessions as pos- sible to the history of existing cities. "We must refuse to afford even the slightest concession to what is: to the mess we are in now," he wrote. "There is no solution to be found there." Instead, his new city would preferably rise on a cleared site as a single, integrated urban composi- Scott, J. C. (1999). Seeing like a state : How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:45:38. C o p yr ig h t © 1 9 9 9 . Y a le U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . The High-Modernist City 107 17. Aerial view of Alsace, circa 1930, from Le Corbusier's La ville radieuse tion. Le Corbusier's new urban order was to be a lyrical marriage be- tween Cartesian pure forms and the implacable requirements of the ma- chine. In characteristically bombastic terms, he declared, "We claim, in the name of the steamship, the airplane, and the automobile, the right to health, logic, daring, harmony, perfection."1Â Unlike the exist- ing city of Paris, which to him resembled a "porcupine" and a "vision of Dante's Inferno," his city would be an "organized, serene, forceful, airy, ordered entity."l Geometry and Standardization It is impossible to read much of Le Corbusier or to see many of his architectural drawings without noticing his love (mania?) for simple, repetitive lines and his horror of complexity. He makes a personal commitment to austere lines and represents that commitment as an es- sential characteristic of human nature. In his own words, "an infinity of combinations is possible when innumerable and diverse elements are brought together. But the human mind loses itself and becomes fa- tigued by such a labyrinth of possibilities. Control becomes impossible. The spiritual failure that must result is disheartening. . . . Reason. . . is an unbroken straight line. Thus, in order to save himself from this Scott, J. C. (1999). Seeing like a state : How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:45:38. C o p yr ig h t © 1 9 9 9 . Y a le U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 108 T R A N S F O R M I N G V I S I O N S chaos, in order to provide himself with a bearable, acceptable frame- work for his existence, one productive of human well-being and con- trol, man has projected the laws of nature into a system that is a man- ifestation of the human spirit itself: geometry."12 When Le Corbusier visited New York City, he was utterly taken by the geometric logic of midtown Manhattan. The clarity of what he called the "skyscraper machines" and the street plan pleased him: "The streets are a t right angles to each other and the mind is liberated."I3 Elsewhere Le Corbusier answered what he saw as the criticism of those who were nostalgic for the variety of the existing city-in this case, Paris. People may complain, he noted, that in reality streets intersect at all sorts of angles and that the variations are infinite. "But," he replied, "that's precisely the point. Z eliminate all those things. That's my start- ingpoint. . . . I insist on right-angled inter~ections."~~ Le Corbusier would have liked to endow his love of straight lines and right angles with the authority of the machine, of science, and of nature. Neither the brilliance of his designs nor the heat of his po- lemic, however, could succeed in justifying this move. The machines to which he most adoringly referred-the locomotive, the airplane, and the automobile-embody rounder or more elliptical shapes than right angles (the teardrop being the most streamlined of shapes). As for sci- ence, any shape is geometrical: the trapezoid, the triangle, the circle. If sheer simplicity or efficiency was the criterion, why not prefer the circle or sphere-as the minimum surface enclosing the maximum space-to the square or the rectangle? Nature, as Le Corbusier claimed, might be mathematical, but the complex, intricate, "chaotic" logic of living forms has only recently been understood with the aid of computer^.^^ No, the great architect was expressing no more, and no less, than an aesthetic ideology-a strong taste for classic lines, which he also considered to be "Gallic" lines: "sublime straight lines, and oh, sublime French rigor."16 It was one powerful way of mastering space. What's more, it provided a legible grid that could be easily grasped at a glance and that could be repeated in every direction, ad infinitum. As a practical matter, of course, a straight line was often impractical and ruinously expensive. Where the topography was irregular, building a straight, flat avenue without daunting climbs and descents would re- quire great feats of digging and leveling. Le Corbusier's kind of geom- etry was rarely cost effective. He took his utopian scheme for an abstract, linear city to impres- sive lengths. He foresaw that the industrialization of the construction trades would lead to a welcome standardization. He foresaw, too, the prefabrication of houses and office blocks, whose parts were built at Scott, J. C. (1999). Seeing like a state : How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:45:38. C o p yr ig h t © 1 9 9 9 . Y a le U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . The High-Modernist City 109 factories and then assembled at the building sites. The sizes of all ele- ments would be standardized, with multiples of standard sizes allow- ing for unique combinations determined by the architect. Door frames, windows, bricks, roof tiles, and even screws would all conform to a uni- form code. The first manifesto of CIAM in 1928 called for the new stan- dards to be legislated by the League of Nations, which would develop a universal technical language to be compulsorily taught throughout the world. An international convention would "normalize" the various standard measurements for domestic equipment and appliances.17 Le Corbusier made efforts to practice what he preached. His design for the mammoth Palace of Soviets (never built) was intended to appeal to Soviet high modernism. The building, he claimed, would establish pre- cise and universal new standards for all buildings-standards that would cover lighting, heating, ventilation, structure, and aesthetics and that would be valid in all latitudes for all needs.18 The straight line, the right angle, and the imposition of interna- tional building standards were all determined steps in the direction of simplification. Perhaps the most decisive step, however, was Le Cor- busier's lifelong insistence on strict functional separation. Indicative of this doctrine was the second of fourteen principles he enunciated at the beginning of La ville radieuse, namely, "the death of the street." What he meant by this was simply the complete separation of pedestrian traffic from vehicle traffic and, beyond that, the segregation of slow- from fast-moving vehicles. He abhorred the mingling of pedestrians and vehicles, which made walking unpleasant and impeded the circu- lation of traffic. The principle of functional segregation was applied across the board. Written by Le Corbusier and his brother Pierre, the final report for the second meeting of CIAM, in 1929, began with an assault on tra- ditional housing construction: "The poverty, the inadequacy of tradi- tional techniques have brought in their wake a confusion of powers, an artificial mingling of functions, only indifferently related to one an- other. . . . We must find and apply new methods . . . lending themselves naturally to standardization, industrialization, Taylorization. . . . If we persist in the present methods by which the two functions [arrange- ment and furnishing versus construction; circulation versus structure] are mingled and interdependent, then we will remain petrified in the same immobility."19 Outside the apartment block, the city itself was an exercise in planned functional segregation-an exercise that became standard urban-planning doctrine until the late 1960s. There would be separate zones for workplaces, residences, shopping and entertainment centers, Scott, J. C. (1999). Seeing like a state : How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:45:38. C o p yr ig h t © 1 9 9 9 . Y a le U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 110 T R A N S F O R M I N G V I S I O N S and monuments and government buildings. Where possible, work zones were to be further subdivided into office buildings and facto- ries. Le Corbusier's insistence on a n urban plan in which each district had one and only one function was evident in his first act after taking over the planning of Chandigarh, his only built city. He replaced the housing that had been planned for the city center with an "acropolis of monuments" on a 220-acre site at a great distance from the nearest r e ~ i d e n c e s . ~ ~ In his Plan Voisin for Paris, he separated what he called la ville, which was for dwelling, and the business center, which was for working. "These are two distinct functions, consecutive and not si- multaneous, representative of two distinct and categorically separate areas."21 The logic of this rigid segregation of functions is perfectly clear. It is far easier to plan an urban zone if it has just one purpose. It is far eas- ier to plan the circulation of pedestrians if they do not have to compete with automobiles and trains. It is far easier to plan a forest if its sole purpose is to maximize the yield of furniture-grade timber. When two purposes must be served by a single facility or plan, the trade-offs be- come nettlesome. When several or many purposes must be considered, the variables that the planner must juggle begin to boggle the mind. Faced with such a labyrinth of possibilities, as Le Corbusier noted, "the human mind loses itself and becomes fatigued." The segregation of functions thus allowed the planner to think with greater clarity about efficiency. If the only function of roads is to get automobiles from A to B quickly and economically, then one can com- pare two road plans in terms of relative efficiency. This logic is emi- nently reasonable inasmuch as this is precisely what we have in mind when we build a road from A to B. Notice, however, that the clarity is achieved by bracketing the many other purposes that we may want roads to serve, such as affording the leisure of a touristic drive, pro- viding aesthetic beauty or visual interest, or enabling the transfer of heavy goods. Even in the case of roads, narrow criteria of efficiency ignore other ends that are not trivial. In the case of the places that peo- ple call home, narrow criteria of efficiency do considerably greater vio- lence to human practice. Le Corbusier calculates the air (la respiration exacte), heat, light, and space people need as a matter of public health. Starting with a figure of fourteen square meters per person, he reckons that this could be reduced to ten square meters if such activities as food preparation and laundering were communal. But here the crite- ria of efficiency that may apply to a road can hardly do justice to a home, which is variously used as a place for work, recreation, privacy, sociability, education, cooking, gossip, politics, and so on. Each of Scott, J. C. (1999). Seeing like a state : How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:45:38. C o p yr ig h t © 1 9 9 9 . Y a le U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . The High-Modernist City 1 1 1 these activities, moreover, resists being reduced to criteria of effi- ciency; what is going on in the kitchen when someone is cooking for friends who have gathered there is not merely "food preparation." But the logic of efficient planning from above for large populations re- quires that each of the values being maximized be sharply specified and that the number of values being maximized simultaneously be sharply restricted-preferably to a single value.12 The logic of Le Cor- busier's doctrine was to carefully delineate urban space by use and function so that single-purpose planning and standardization were possible.23 Rule by the Plan, the Planner, and the State The first of Le Corbusier's "principles of urbanism," before even "the death of the street," was the dictum "The Plan: D i c t a t ~ r . " ~ ~ It would be difficult to exaggerate the emphasis that, like Descartes, Le Cor- busier placed on making the city the reflection of a single, rational plan. He greatly admired Roman camps and imperial cities for the overall logic of their layouts. He returned repeatedly to the contrast between the existing city, which is the product of historical chance, and the city of the future, which would be consciously designed from start to finish following scientific principles. The centralization required by Le Corbusier's doctrine of the Plan (always capitalized in his usage) is replicated by the centralization of the city itself. Functional segregation was joined to hierarchy. His city was a "monocephalic" city, its centrally located core performing the "higher" functions of the metropolitan area. This is how he described the business center of his Plan Voisin for Paris: "From its offices come the commands that put the world in order. In fact, the skyscrapers are the brain of the city, the brain of the whole country. They embody the work of elaboration and command on which all activities depend. Everything is concentrated there: the tools that conquer time and space-telephones, telegraphs, radios, the banks, trading houses, the organs of decision for the factories: finance, technology, commerce."25 The business center issues commands; it does not suggest, much less consult. The program of high-modernist authoritarianism at work here stems in part from Le Corbusier's love of the order of the factory. In condemning the "rot" (la pourriture) of the contemporary city, its houses, and its streets, he singles out the factory as the sole exception. There, a single rational purpose structures both the physical layout and the coordinated movements of hundreds. The Van Nelle tobacco factory in Rotterdam is praised in particular. Le Corbusier admires its auster- Scott, J. C. (1999). Seeing like a state : How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:45:38. C o p yr ig h t © 1 9 9 9 . Y a le U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 112 T R A N S F O R M I N G V I S I O N S ity, its floor-to-ceiling windows on each floor, the order in the work, and the apparent contentment of the workers. He finishes with a hymn to the authoritarian order of the production line. "There is a hierarchical scale, famously established and respected," he admiringly observes of the workers. "They accept it so as to manage themselves like a colony of worker-bees: order, regularity, punctuality, justice and ~ a t e r n a l i s m . " ~ ~ The scientific urban planner is to the design and construction of the city as the entrepreneur-engineer is to the design and construction of the factory. Just as a single brain plans the city and the factory, so a sin- gle brain directs its activity-from the factory's office and from the city's business center. The hierarchy doesn't stop there. The city is the brain of the whole society. "The great city commands everything: peace, war, work."27 Whether it is a matter of clothing, philosophy, technol- ogy, or taste, the great city dominates and colonizes the provinces: the lines of influence and command are exclusively from the center to the periphery.28 There is no ambiguity to Le Corbusier's view of how authority rela- tions should be ordered: hierarchy prevails in every direction. At the apex of the pyramid, however, is not a capricious autocrat but rather a modern philosopher-king who applies the truths of scientific under- standing for the well-being of all.29 It is true, naturally, that the master planner, in his not infrequent bouts of megalomania, imagines that he alone has a monopoly on the truth. In a moment of personal reflection in T h e Radiant City, for example, Le Corbusier declares: "I drew up plans [for Algiers], after analyses, after calculations, with imagination, with poetry. The plans were prodigiously true. They were incontro- vertible. They were breathtaking. They expressed all the splendor of modern times."30 It is not, however, the excess of pride that concerns us here but the sort of implacable authority Le Corbusier feels entitled to claim on behalf of universal scientific truths. His high-modernist faith is nowhere so starkly-or so ominously-expressed as in the follow- ing, which I quote at length: The despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. This plan has been drawn u p well away from the frenzy i n the mayor's office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society's vic- tims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken ac- count of nothing but human truths. It has ignored all current regula- tions, all existing usages, and channels. It has not considered whether or not it could be carried out with the constitution now in force. It is a biological creation destined for human beings and capable of realiza- tion by modern techniques.31 Scott, J. C. (1999). Seeing like a state : How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:45:38. C o p yr ig h t © 1 9 9 9 . Y a le U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . The High-Modernist City 1 13 The wisdom of the plan sweeps away all social obstacles: the elected au- thorities, the …